A watery highway along coast slowly fills in

Sunday

Cruising the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway is akin to flying a plane: hours of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror.

W. Tom Sawyer Jr., who sails from Maine southward each year, has seen the latter, right here on the Intracoastal in Georgia.

A speeding boat once passed him several miles south of an especially difficult passage near Skidaway Island called Hell Gate.

"I got to wave hello to him as he sat high and dry right next to an exposed crab pot several hours later," said Sawyer, a part-time Richmond Hill resident.

Like Sawyer, who pilots a 40-foot teak-trimmed trawler replete with one and a half baths, a kitchen and a washer/dryer below the deck, hordes of well-heeled snowbirds travel up and down the waterway. But unlike the 58-year-old native Mainer who's been boating for more than four decades, they don't all have the skills to maneuver their boats through passages made difficult by years of neglect in Georgia.

So, to the chagrin of marina operators and others who earn their living from boaters, these wealthy wayfarers avoid the state altogether.

Getting the waterway back into shape has been cause No. 1 for the Georgia Marine Business Association.

"We are the real trailer trash of the (Intracoastal), and we've got to get that fixed," said Charlie Waller, the association's president and co-owner and manager of Isle of Hope Marina.

Money now, study later

Waller is starting to see results of his efforts to lobby for the "ditch," as it's affectionately known.

The current federal budget has $1.87 million earmarked for maintenance of the Intracoastal in Georgia. That's the largest sum of money this stretch has received since 2002.

After money is spent on the required quarterly surveys and formulating the dredging plan, about $1.3 million will be targeted at three of the worst sites:

Hell Gate, near Skidaway at the mouth of the Ogeechee.

Buttermilk Sound in Glynn County.

The Florida Passage, about three miles south of Hell Gate.

"Hell Gate is the No. 1 thing we're looking at," said Billy Birdwell, spokesman for the Savannah District of the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the 161 miles of the Intracoastal from Port Royal Sound to Cumberland Sound.

"It's almost at the point that at low tide you could wade across it."

Dredging is expected to start in September and take about six months.

The Intracoastal is a federally authorized project, and, as such, it's Washington's job to maintain it at a 12-foot depth at mean low tide for most of its length.

But here's the rub: When the Intracoastal was first envisioned, it was meant to be a boon for barge traffic.

"The Office of Management and Budget funds it on commercial tonnage," said Merritt Myers, legislative director for U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, who pushed for the current earmark. "They never take into consideration recreational usage."

But with the Intracoastal no longer a popular commercial route in Georgia, future earmarks are far from certain.

Instead, Georgia needs another plan - one that gets the state invested in the waterway because of the returns it brings to coastal economies, Waller and others say.

Trouble is, nobody can put a dollar figure to those returns. Not yet, anyway.

Fresh data

A new study is expected to provide that data and garner support for a state-sponsored funding mechanism.

The $72,000 study, headed by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia, will send surveys to 17,000 boaters registered in Georgia and to about 4,000 out-of-state boaters who are likely to transit Georgia's waters.

The boaters will be asked how much they spend on a typical outing and how the channel's degradation is likely to affect their use of it, said Wes Clarke, an official at the Carl Vinson Institute.

Money for the study is coming from the Georgia Ports Authority, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the University of Georgia and the Savannah Chamber of Commerce, the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway Association and the Georgia Marine Business Association.

A study in Florida indicated spending $16 million a year to maintain its waterway generates $18 billion in revenue, increases property values by $38 billion, and creates 220,000 jobs paying $6 billion in salaries.

Georgia won't spend or reap that much, as the waterway is more limited in the Peach State, but if the rewards are proportionate, with $1,125 back for every dollar spent, it's a great investment, Waller said.

And not just for businesses such as his. Intracoastal cruisers need a full range of services, from groceries and restaurants to doctors and veterinarians.

"People think it's just marinas that care," Waller said. "It flows down through the economy."

Go to Hell Gate

On a sunny weekday morning earlier this month, Sawyer took some buddies on a short cruise on his newly repaired fast trawler, the Dirigo Pilot.

As the boat pulled out of Fort McAllister Marina, first mate of the day Bryan Duck pulled up its bumpers.

In fact, the Dirigo Pilot, named for the Maine state motto (Latin for "I lead") and the boat's brand, Island Pilot, is equipped with computerized charts, automatic pilot and a captain who's sailed to Bermuda three times and is a coxswain with the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, among his other boating achievements.

The boat's draft, Sawyer says as he approaches Hell Gate, is about 3 feet. That will stay out of a lot more trouble than a typical sailboat, with a 6- to 8-foot draft.

Sawyer keeps his eye on the charts and the channel markers as he enters Hell Gate, which looks to be hundreds of feet wide, but which shoaling has narrowed to a barely navigable passage just a fraction of that.

"You can't be distracted by what it looks like. You have to follow the instruments," Sawyer said, pointing to a computer screen. "You can see it's not a wide opening."

Who's at fault?

Sawyer, a bear of a man with a full gray beard and ruddy skin, questions who's at fault when boats run aground in areas such as Hell Gate.

"Is it about how the Corps hasn't maintained it or how more and more dot-com folks bought their first boats without years of practice?" he asked. "You have to have a license to drive a car, to hunt, to fish in fresh water. I think the time has come for some mandatory education if you're going to be out in a boat."

He has a point, Waller said.

"I kind of agree and disagree," he said. "Any fool with money can buy a boat and go out there and cause trouble."

Waller also supports more rigorous boater education and licensing, which exists in a few states, but not Georgia.

Nevertheless, Waller wants the Intracoastal made safer, too.

"If a road gets bad, a better driver is better able to handle it, but you still want to fix the road," he said.

Even experienced boaters make mistakes, as Sawyer proved on his way back from Hell Gate.

"Oh, I'm supposed to be on the other side of that marker," he said as he passed on the wrong side of a green day marker with a cormorant resting atop it. "That was not a fatal flaw."

But it did show how easily others could make a mistake and why tough passages may make them avoid Georgia, exactly what Waller fears.

"As the waterway declines, they'll do what's called 'go outside,' " Waller said, referring to the practice of traveling on the ocean. "It's a short coastline. They can pop out at north Florida and pop back in at Hilton Head."

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